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Ants Gone Wild: The Worst Sex Ever

Slovakian wildlife photographer Adrián Skippy Purkart captured a queen ant being ravaged by a swarm of males while having her brain sucked out of her head by a spider. This video was posted on the Amateur myrmecology Youtube channel.

While the activity Purkart captured might seem horrible, it should not be considered abnormal. It's simply a nuptial flight gone wrong. After all, the name queen ant, like the queen bee, is not the best description of her role in the colony. While the queen is larger than the other ants, she is not the leader.

Think of an ant colony as a single, complex organism. A single ant brain, such as the one the spider is snacking on in the video below, has about 250,000 brain cells. A human brain, on the other hand, consists of 10,000 million. An yet, a colony of 40,000 ants taken together has the same size brain as a human being. They just divide up the tasks really well. In the case of the queen, her only role is to function as a reproductive agent.

So in this event, everyone was simply going about their business as expected. The queen just happened to get eaten by a spider. Sure makes me glad to be human.